Finished David Graeber’s Debt. Read for review a preview of Jal Mehta’s excellent book about school reform, The Allure of Order. Started Octavia Butler’s Kindred.Also still reading The Two Towers to my son…got to the trek through Mordor, which I think is the best part so far….

3 Comments

Been working my way through Fantagraphics’ new Krigstein anthology, which is great. A lot of these single-artist anthologies have to struggle to convince people who weren’t already fans of the artist’s greatness, but not this one, at least not for me. Having never read more of Krigstein than “Master Race”, I wasn’t prepared for just how good he was. Wow. Interesting to see just how many different styles he mastered, too — from a Rackham-esque golden age of illustration fine line, to Toth minimalism with Kurtzman thick line on cartoonish figures (which I wasn’t expecting at all), to his most recognizable angular two-dimensional expressionism with calligraphic line (which reminded me a lot of Feininger, of all people). Holy shit.

And I saw The Loneliest Planet, which hit very close to home for me, and that’s before the big incident halfway through. First Gerry, then Meek’s Cutoff, and now this — I’m really getting a taste for this weird little subgenre of minimalist slowcore cinema, a subgenre we might call the Slow Walking Through Natural Landscape movie. If only Peter Jackson had offered a more page-for-page interpretation of Tolkien; the trilogy would have been 27 hours, of which 18 was various characters walking…

I’m up to volume 30 of One Piece now, and I also started reading Jerusalem, by Boaz Yakin and Nick Bertozzi.

Movies: I watched Our Idiot Brother, which was an enjoyably low-key family dramedy with Paul Rudd, Zooey Deschanel, Elizabeth Banks, Emily Mortimer, Steve Coogan, and Adam Scott. I’m especially impressed by how good of an actor Rudd is; he took what could have been a stereotypical hippie/stoner character and gave him real depth and soul, really holding the movie together amidst some obvious writing and occasionally questionable performances by the actresses playing his sisters. As funny as he can be, he’s quickly becoming one of my favorite actors.

I also watched The Man With the Iron Fists, a pretty badass martial arts movie directed by RZA, of the Wu-Tang Clan. He’s obviously a fan of classic kung fu movies, because he nails the style, while adding some pretty gorgeous visuals and a sweet soundtrack. I’m probably a bit more old-school in my tastes, since I liked fights from earlier in the movie a bit better than the big finale, since they focused more on smaller-scale one-on-one fights or bits in which one guy took on several and used his awesome powers/weapons to take them all down. The final battle royale has some pretty cool stuff, like Lucy Liu tearing bad guys up with a razorblade fan, but a lot of it is edited too quickly in the American action style, and there’s so much going on that not enough time is given to some of the various matchups. RZA himself, who plays the titular blacksmith who creates some badass prosthetics after having his forearms forcibly amputated, isn’t the best actor or fighter, so his big battle at the end is kind of clunky. But he does throw in a lot of cool techniques, like split screens and a fight in a mirror maze that warps and distorts images all over the place. Overall, it was enjoyable but not an all-time great or anything. I’d love for RZA to keep making more like it though; we could always use more martial arts movies.

I’d recommend doing the grocery shopping; the stretch of cover after cover of baby/pregnancy/motherhood/dieting/who’s getting married/who’s cheating on who-focused crapola at the checkout aisle could not be more different…

As for those with “heavily eroticized images of women,” it’s because most straight women want to look like sex objects, the better to lure those shallow jerks who are into that “look.” (Which is most men, unfortunately.)

It’s the female version of “dress for success.” “Success” defined as attracting and catching a male, unfortunately; the empty ego-tripping of being perceived as “sexy”…

———————-
Esquire retails yet another fantasy of mastery for men. Women’s magazines, on the other hand, offer a fantasy of mastery for women.
———————

Um. Men’s magazines are about “how to get her to satisfy you.” Women’s magazines are cram-packed with advice on “how to satisfy him.”

I guess that’s a kind of “mastery,” as in having the power to make construction workers wolf-whistle at you…

Whether it’s women’s magazines featuring “heavily eroticized images of women” or focusing on “baby/pregnancy/motherhood/dieting,” what thy have in common is in pushing a “traditional” view of women, as sex object or mother…